January 19, 1985

Bellow Visits New York for Rare Public Reading

By EDWIN McDOWELL

ike a soldier returning to the wars, Saul Bellow returned
to New York City last night for his first public reading
here in more than 20 years. Not only that, the Nobel
laureate said he was actually looking forward to his
appearance, even though some of his novels have depicted
New York in less than flattering terms.
Mr. Bellow planned to read for an hour from ''Him With His
Foot in His Mouth,'' a recent collection of short stories,
and answer questions from the audience at the Writer's
Voice, a literary forum at the West Side Y.M.C.A.

''When I got the invitation I thought, 'Should I do it?' ''
Mr. Bellow explained in a recent telephone interview from
Chicago. ''Then I thought that it's a very pleasant time in
New York and this would provide official cover for my trip.
Besides, I haven't seen the graffiti in some time.''
Only a resident of Chicago would think of January as a
pleasant time of year back East, but the remark could well
have come from the pages of ''Mr. Sammler's Planet'' or
''The Victim,'' Bellow novels that paint New York in harsh
colors. ''Mr. Sammler's Planet,'' for example, depicts
Artur Sammler's odyssey through a decaying, malodorous city
whose outdoor telephone booths are used as urinals and
whose militant students render rational discourse
impossible by howling like Barbary apes.

When ''Sammler'' was published 15 years ago, Mr. Bellow
said it was meant ''to be typical of the madness in New
York City middle-class life.'' New York, he told an
interviewer at the time, ''depresses me - there's such a
sense of malignancy and despair.''

Debt to Two Cities

If it is any consolation to New Yorkers, Mr. Bellow's
estimation of the Big Apple has risen in recent years,
although only by comparison. ''I think you have to take
Chicago into account when you consider my view of New York
and other cities,'' he said. ''Chicago has made me feel
that every other place is quite safe.'' Despite its
reputation as ''the city that works,'' he said that ''it
hasn't worked for quite a while.''

Asked how he has been able to endure it, Mr. Bellow said,
''Because we have a very agreeable apartment that looks
eastward over Lake Michigan, rather than westward over the
city.''

For all his Windy City bluster, however, Mr. Bellow's debts
to Chicago and New York are clearly evident. From
''Dangling Man'' (1944) to ''The Dean's December'' (1982),
most of his novels pulse with the rhythms of Division
Street and the Loop, or of the Upper West Side and
Greenwich Village.

'Vocal Style' of Books

He is ''the premiere American novelist,'' according to the
critic Joseph Epstein, and he is certainly one of the most
honored. Mr. Bellow is the only author to have won three
National Book Awards: for ''The Adventures of Augie
March''(published in 1953), ''Herzog'' (1964) and ''Mr.
Samml er's Planet'' (1970). In 1975 he won the Pulitzer
Prize for ''Humboldt's Gift,'' and a year later he won the
Nobel Prize for Literature.

While generally content to let his books speak for
themselves, Mr. Bellow has given several public readings in
recent years. ''But I don't often do it, because I don't
think writers are necessarily public performers,'' he said.
When he does it, however, one reason is to clarify
misunderstandings that can occur when certain passages in
his books are read ''off key.''

''For many years now my books have been written in a kind
of oral or vocal style,'' Mr. Bellow said, ''and so it
helps to hear the author reading them - you can get the
right musical signature when you hear the writer's
intonation and hear where he puts the weight.'' In the
absence of that, some readers confuse irony or mockery with
what he labels ''deep thought.''

''A good example is 'Herzog,' '' he said, referring to
Moses Herzog, who writes numerous unmailed letters to the
great philosophers and theoreticians, living and dead. ''I
meant it to be funny, but many people read it like they
were taking a six-hour comprehensive exam in the
humanities.''

Introduction to New York

Mr. Bellow, who was born in Canada and grew up in Chicago,
began visiting New York as a college student from Chicago.
''In those days it was a great adventure,'' he recalled.
''You took a Greyhound bus and it took two days, stopping
every two hours for a cup of coffee. When trains became a
little more affordable, I would take them, and by that time
I had Chicago friends in the Village or Brooklyn Heights to
stay with.''

During World War II, Mr. Bellow was stationed for a while
in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn in a Merchant
Marine training program, and he settled in New York after
the war. Shortly after publication of ''The Victim''
(1947), about a Hamlet-like, middle-aged, middle- class New
Yorker, Mr. Bellow went for two years on a Guggenheim
Fellowship to Paris, where he wrote ''The Adventures of
Augie March.''

In the 1950's, Mr. Bellow lived in a succession of
apartments in Forest Hills, Greenwich Village and the Upper
West Side. He also lived in Dutchess County while teaching
at Bard College for a year, a year he describes as ''the
hardest job'' he ever held. ''It was like a Montessori
school for adolescents from rich New York families,'' he
said. ''You had to be nursemaids to the kids.''

With money inherited from his father, he bought an old
house on the Hudson River in Tivoli, N.Y. - ''an old
Faulkner mansion that had drifted north'' - and there he
wrote ''Henderson the Rain King,'' a novel about a
brawling, hard-drinking, rich American's search for
spiritual salvation in Africa.

Novel Germinating

During his New York years, Mr. Bellow fraternized with
writers associated with The Partisan Review, but he severed
his ties with the journal in the early 1960's when, he
said, it became heavily politicized. He also returned to
Chicago, where for more than 20 years he has been a
professor in the University of Chicago's Committee on
Social Thought.

Mr. Bellow is now writing more short stories. ''And
somewhere at the back of my mind I'm putting together a
novel,'' he said. That germination process means thinking
it out in broad terms, not trying to plot every zig and zag
in the story line. ''I don't bother with the details,'' he
said, ''because I like to be agreeably surprised by what I
write.''